If we could board a train that could circle the globe seven times per second- just a little slower than the speed of light- time would slow down on board while continuing normally outside. If we hopped on the train on January 1, 2011 and travelled for five years, when we got off the train it would be January 1, 2021.

This is according to Stephen Hawking. Time travel to the future is theoretically possible. And all we need to get there is an impossibly fast engine. Or we could cruise around a super massive black hole in some kind of spaceship. The mass of four millions suns would drag time down with its gravity, and when we get off the ship, we’d be in the future.

If we traveled far enough in time, when we got there the bacteria would have evolved and we’d drop dead from the common cold. Or maybe the cylons have already evolved and rebelled and nuked the earth, and whatever few survivors remain in the fallout are left underwhelmed by a confusing and disappointing series finale.

Here’s my point: the future is a scary place, and getting there is hard.

Mr. Hawking says that traveling to the past is pretty much impossible because its fraught with deal-breaking paradoxes. And you’d need a man-sized wormhole. Which is typical, because that’s precisely the direction I’d be heading if all this Marty McFly stuff was a genuine offer and not just a brain-breaking piece of abstruse theory. The past is easier to understand. I know where all the safe places are (were) and it’d be great to revisit the good times while correcting mistakes. But alas, no dice.

Right, then. The future is coming on, and there’s not a damn thing any of us can do about it. And it is scary, let’s admit it. It’s like a massive, bone-chilling, Lovecraftian horror.

So let’s screw our courage to the sticking place. Let’s get it sorted. For me, it means making a final decision on a post-grad path. For you it might be different, like whether or not to buy a one-way ticket for the Particle Collider Express. But it’s going to be all right. We’ll all be all right. We’ll be in the future. And there better be jet packs.